James Morrow: Albanese’s comeback kid routine hints at more class warfare to come

In attacking the opposition rather than answering their questions, Anthony Albanese is leaving the door open to charges that he may come for the family home or negative gearing, write James Morrow.

Readers who already feel defeated by the new year would be well within their rights to wonder just what exactly is the prime minister’s holiday recharge secret.

When parliament resumed on Tuesday, Anthony Albanese seemed like something of a new man.

Gone (at least for now) was the sad sack Albo of old, who with his “I fight Tories” and “modest requests” always felt a little like a man auditioning for the part of Willy Loman in a community theatre production of Death of a Salesman.

Instead, the prime minister’s first Question Time performance of 2024 was all fire and brimstone, taking it right up to Peter Dutton and using every simple question (do you rule out changes to the tax treatment of the family home?) as an excuse to fling grenades at the opposition.

At one point, the prime minister got so carried away at the dispatch box that he compared Dutton to Jack Nicholson in The Shining, swinging an imaginary axe and yelling, “Here’s Peter!”

Anthony Albanese compared Peter Dutton to Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining.

Of course, we all know why the PM is so fired up, and it’s not because of those few days he and his partner spent in the Margaret River (as refreshing a destination as that might be).

Quite simply, he thinks he’s on a winner with his revised Stage 3 tax cuts, and that the opposition’s position on the question is incoherent.

Well, up to a point.

Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton on Tuesday. Picture: NewsWire

There is no doubt the opposition looked briefly poleaxed by the new policy, allowing Team Albanese to brazen out charges that they broke a promise (who in politics doesn’t, they reason, and anyone if everyone gets a few more bucks every fortnight they’ll be forgiven).

There is also no doubt Dutton is the victim of the ghost of Liberal leaders past who put the implementation of the cuts so far into the future they were all but guaranteed to be someone else’s problem.

But watching this newly confident and downright punchy Albanese, flying the banner of empathy and fighting for essential workers, it is hard not to see the cracks already emerging.

Labor may think it is winning the politics of Stage 3 (the polls are thus far reserving judgment).

But for Albanese the fundamental problem with his transformation is that it is built on a broken promise, even if it does “give every taxpayer a tax cut”.

Not only that, if the prime minister is trying to do his best Paul Keating, well, he is doing it by winding back rather than advancing real economic reform by falling back on the politics of envy.

The prime minister may have tried to match the fire of his predecessor Paul Keating, but the reform chops are missing.

This is not, ultimately, solid ground from which to fight heading into an election season that is already beginning to come into focus.

This is also why the opposition was keen to hammer Labor and force the prime minister to commit one way or another to not taxing the family home and not touching negative gearing.

On the one hand, Albanese knows how much trouble Bill Shorten got into over franking credits in 2019 and does not want to repeat the mistake.

On the other, feeling like he got away first with tinkering with high value superannuation accounts and now tax cuts on the basis that it’s only “the wealthy” who lose anything, he must be very tempted to roll the dice again.

Is it out of the realm of possibility that with so much anxiety around housing, and with developers and progressives alike stoking intergenerational warfare, that Labor might one day say, well, you can have the first (say) $2 million of capital gains tax free, but after that you’re on the hook?

Worry about Bill Shorten’s plans to touch franking credits are widely believed to have cost him the 2019 election.

It is pure speculation, but this would fit the government’s pattern of saying, well, the vast majority of people will still have a win while the well off are forced to pay a bit more.

And this brings us back to where we started, to the Albo of old.

There was a flash of the Tory-fighter in Tuesday’s question time, when the prime minister fired up about the subject of aspiration, saying that (fair enough) lower paid workers could be aspirational as well.

But buried in his peroration against the Coalition was the same old jabs about the Liberals and going to “the right school”.

It need not be said, of course, that the great thing about Australia is that anyone can aspire to – and often achieve – things like an investment property and private schooling for their kids, and many of the people who do are tradies and others in suburban seats who feel like they are taken for granted by Labor.

There’s one more thing, too.

The prime minister was very keen to hammer the Coalition as being a mess, after having watched the ABC’s documentary about their years in power last week.

A newly confident Albanese should remember Nemesis is exactly what happens when you show a bit too much hubris.